Valuing quality

The Patient-Focused Funding Working Group must: •. include representatives from the Ministry of Health Services, the health authorities, the BCMA, and appropriate allied health professionals; •. consider the simultaneous use of strategic non-financial incentives in patient-focused funding programs; and •. rigorously evaluate and monitor the impact of patient-focused funding programs on the timelin [...] Institutional Funding Population needs-based funding Population needs-based funding was introduced in British Columbia in 2002 and is used to allocate funding from the Ministry of Health Services to the health authorities for acute, home, and residential care. [...] Population needs-based funding attempts to address some of the disadvantages of global budgeting by using a series of “adjusters,” such as changes in population size and age, variations in the location of service provision, and costs associated with remote location, teaching, and so on to estimate the population’s demand to seek health services (McKillop 2001). [...] Time- based payment encourages physicians to spend more time per client; whether the additional time is beneficial depends on the nature of the visit, the needs of the patient, and the costs of the other services that might have been provided instead (Deber 2008). [...] However, advocates of nearly all of the financial and non-financial incentives presented in the academic and policy literatures over the past decade have attempted to link the incentive more explicitly to improvements in patient outcomes or experiences.